Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system capable of controlling registration of expense information based on a user operation on an image processing apparatus.
Description of the Related Art
It is common that a digital multi-function peripheral (MFP), which is equipped with hardware resources such as a scanner and a printer, is placed in an office for daily use because recent office works often require copy, print, and FAX transmission processing.
However, in a case where such an MFP is located in an office, a client may be asked to pay for the expenses required to use the MFP. The expenses in this case include print related expenses, time-charge rate based expenses, and labor costs of respective workers or persons.
For example, a law firm may ask a client to pay for the expenses required when a lawyer uses an MFP to handle a legal matter. For example, as discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2013-192165, there is a conventional image forming apparatus that is configured to ask a client of each matter to pay for the expenses required when the MFP is used as mentioned above. According to the above-mentioned image forming apparatus, a lawyer in charge is required to input matter information that associates the above-mentioned expenses with each matter to the MFP, and a user is required to operate the MFP to perform a copy operation and then, by instructing a job, to register required expense information in association with the input matter information to a matter management server.
On the other hand, it is a trend that an MFP equipped with a scanner and a printer includes a web browser. In this case, the MFP can use the web browser to access a web server and can use a service provided by the web server, as described in detail below. First, the MFP causes the web browser to display an operation screen provided by the web server and receives various instructions from a user. Further, in the MFP, a web application can operate and control an application that uses the scanner and the printer incorporated in a conventional MFP, according to a request from the web server that has accepted various instructions received from a user via the web browser.
Further, as discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2014-164592, there is a conventional printing system including a print service server that transmits a print job to an image processing apparatus via a network. In this conventional printing system, the print service server manages print job ID included in each print job to be transmitted in association with user ID. Further, the image processing apparatus transmits the job ID of the executed print job and print job information (e.g., number of printed papers) to a totaling server. Further, the totaling server acquires a corresponding user ID by inquiring the print service server with reference to the job ID received together with the print job information (e.g., number of printed papers), and stores the acquired user ID in association with the print job information (e.g., number of printed papers).
In the above-mentioned system including the web server and the MFP, the following problems arise if sequential web application processing including the processing by the web server and the job execution by the MFP is performed and expense information relating to the sequential processing is registered to an expense management server.
According to the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2013-192165, the MFP is simply configured to register information about a job directly performed by the MFP to an expense management apparatus (i.e., the matter management server) and is not configured to execute a job in cooperation with the web browser or the web server. Therefore, it is difficult to display a screen provided from the web server on the web browser and enable a user to select an expense registration matter on the web browser. Further, it was difficult to acquire expense information including operation time or number of times when the web browser logs in or logs out of the web server. Accordingly, the following procedure was required when the MFP cooperates with the web browser or the web server.
More specifically, a user is required to refer to a processing history of the MFP to acquire job information relating to a matter after the user has used the web browser and the web server to perform sequential web application processing. Further, the user is required to calculate a difference between a login time and a logout time while the web browser of the MFP accesses the web server. Then, the user is required to perform a manual operation to register the acquired job information and the above-mentioned calculated time, as expense information, to the matter management server, via a computer. Therefore, a person in charge was always forced to perform a very troublesome work to register the expense information.
Further, according to the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2014-164592, the print service server and the totaling server are required to cooperate with each other. Therefore, in a case where the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2014-164592 is used to register expense information and matter information about a job executed by the image processing apparatus in response to a request from the web server instructed via the web browser of the image processing apparatus, while associating them with each other, to the matter management server, it is necessary to provide an expense registration processing mechanism dedicated to a cooperation interface of each individual cooperation destination for the web server and the matter management server.
Accordingly, if the configurations of the web server and the matter management server cannot be easily changed, it may be difficult to provide a processing mechanism dedicated to each individual cooperation destination.